An international row over newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad gathered pace today as more European dailies printed controversial Danish caricatures and Muslims stepped up pressure to stop them.
Spokesman for Yasser Arafat Brigades
Palestinian gunmen surrounded European Union offices in the Gaza Strip demanding an apology for the cartoons, one of which shows Islam's founder wearing a bomb-shaped turban.
Muslims consider any images of Muhammad to be blasphemous.
About a dozen gunmen, from the militant group Islamic Jihad and an armed faction of Fatah, known as the Yasser Arafat Brigades, climbed the surrounding walls of the compound and fired into the air before leaving the scene, witnesses said.
"We will watch the office closely and if European countries continued their assaults against Islam and against the Prophet Muhammad, we will turn this office into ruins," a spokesman for the Yasser Arafat Brigades said.
Another armed Fatah group, called the Abu el-Reesh Brigades, said citizens of Norway, Denmark, France and Germany in Gaza "will be in danger" if their governments do not apologise within 10 hours. EU officials had no immediate comment.
The owner of France Soir, a Paris daily that reprinted them today along with one German and two Spanish papers, sacked its managing editor to show "a strong sign of respect for the beliefs and intimate convictions of every individual".
But the tabloid defended its right to print the cartoons, first published last September in Danish daily Jyllands-Posten.
Le Tempsin Geneva and Budapest's Magyar Hirlapran another offending cartoon showing an imam telling suicide bombers to stop because Heaven had run out of virgins to reward them.
Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the issue had gone beyond a row between Copenhagen and the Muslim world and now centred on Western free speech versus taboos in Islam, which is now the second religion in many European countries
"We are talking about an issue with fundamental significance to how democracies work," Mr Rasmussen told the Copenhagen daily Politiken.
European Union External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner called for restraint after talks in Brussels with Gulf Co-operation Council Secretary-General Abdul-Rahman al-Attiyah, who strongly criticised the cartoons.
"We are . . . a society that likes tolerance and I think it has to be in our understanding that we have a sensitivity for other religious communities," she told reporters.
Danish companies have reported sales falling in the Middle East after protests against the cartoons in the Arab world and calls for boycotts.
Morocco and Tunisia confiscated today's France Soir, which is widely distributed in North Africa. Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Muhammad, and Syria have recalled their ambassadors to Denmark.
Jyllands-Postenhas apologised for any hurt the caricatures may have caused. Police said the paper's offices in Aarhus were evacuated yesterday for the second time in two days after a bomb threat. Workers returned after the all-clear.